In My Margins

I read fewer books than I'd expected to while I was in London. Recently finished:

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent-Teacher Association, by Caitlin Rozakis, is a fantasy novel about a magical school, from the viewpoint of a student's parent.

The Eights, by Joanna Miller, is about four women students who enroll at Oxford University the year the university starts offering degrees to female students. It's set in 1920-21, with flashbacks to earlier in the four women's lives. (The "eights" in the title means the residents of corridor 8.)

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code-maker's War, by Leo Marks, describes working at one of the British government agencies that sent coded messages to underground agents in occupied Europe during the second world war. The author's job included deciphering messages that were mangled either in transit, or by the agent who encoded them, and coming up with new and hopefully better codes.

Evvie Blake Starts Over, by Linda Holmes, is about a woman who was in the process of leaving her husband when he died in a car accident, and her recovery from both the bad marriage and from all the people who expect her to be grieving him. A romance, more or less.

I enjoyed all of these, and don't remember who recommended any most of them to me (adrian_turtle just reminded me that she recommended The Grimoire Grammar School PTA). There's a range of moods here, less because of planning than because of what came up on my library hold lists.

None of these books are useful for my Boston Public Library summer reading bingo cards: I'd already filled the squares for "book with a name in the title" and "published in 2025." I have a book with a green cover on my desk, and got email while I was in London telling me that it had been automatically renewed for another three weeks.

We got home last night, very late in terms of the time zone we woke up in yesterday morning, then spent some time petting and playing with the cats, eating chocolate and ice cream, and unpacking a few things that I needed or wanted right away (slippers, toothbrush, and prescription drugs). I washed a few dishes, because I walked into the kitchen for chocolate and saw that we were almost out of clean mugs in the size we'd want for tea and coffee in the morning.

The trip home was OK as these things go: I ordered a cab to take us to Heathrow, using the service Mom always used, and paid in cash using my half of the British money she'd had in an envelope, including a generous tip for the driver. We had time to finish things like washing our dishes and clearing Mom's data off her computer before leaving, and enough time at the airport to be at the gate before boarding started, but not enough to get bored. I arranged the cab, and got us all aisle seats for the flight home, on Sunday, and then turned everything over to Cattitude and Adrian once we got to Heathrow. By the time we got off the plane, I was so worn out that I was stopping occasionally to lean on the walls in the airport, but fortunately doing better once we got home.

I woke up this morning at 7:30 Boston time, which seemed good--about 7.5 hours sleep, and back on my home time zone. The milk from before we left was iffy but the cut of tea tasted OK. The igniters for the stove burners didn't work when I turned them on, but I remembered both that we have long matches for just this purpose, and where we keep them, so that was OK for the moment, and we can investigate that further when Adrian and Cattitude are also awake.

We plan to do very little today: order groceries, unpack, and I might inject the about-monthly dose of my current MS medication, which I take every 4-6 weeks, and would have taken Saturday if we'd been home). Some balance PT would also be a good idea.

We are essentially done at Mom’s flat. I didn’t have a lot to do today, but am still tired. We will decide tomorrow what if anything we want to do.

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

We had Chinese food delivered tonight, and it was basic good Cantonese food. They included a small bag of those weird shrimp chips, which I turned out to be in the mood for.

We got a lot done yesterday and today, Mark and I sorted through a bunch of stuff on Tuesday, and talked to Ralph (Mom's stepson) and figuring out which things are his/his sister's, and then which withim that what people actually want. Legally, he and Liz own the flat and some of the contents (specified). In practice, there are things none of us want, partly because of geography: Ralph doesn't need furniture, and he's the only one of us who lives anywhere nearby. So it's mostly what has sentimental value, like Simon's family china.

To our London friends: If we get enough done today, we might still be able to see people tomorrow or Saturday, but I don't know yet.

I also got into a stupid argument Tuesday afternoon with Ralph's wife Jenny, who was trying to convince me that my brother and I had some kind of obligation to arrange for clearing out everything that nobody wants, so Liz (Ralph's s sister) can sell the flat. This started with me telling her that we hadn't traveled from the US to be unpaid labor clearing out a flat for someone else to sell, and then on the third time she cirled back to telling her that by insulting my recently deceased mother she wasn't helping. |She said she wasn't trying to help, I told her to at least stop hurting then, and walked away from the conversation. My brother is one of the executor's of the will, so maybe has some obligations here, but Ralph and Liz own the flat now--my mother had a life tenancy and then it went too her stepchildren. I emerged a while later to find that Mark, Ralph, and Jenny had made a bit more progress in figuring things out.

They left here at about five, and Cattitude and Adrian went shopping to buy a few groceries.

liv, who is staying part-time in a flat half a mile from here, came over for the evening, and we had a very good, long visit. Adrian cooked dinner in an unfamiliar kitchen; I'd checked with Live a fw hours earlier about dietary restrictions. The original plan was just for her to come over here, where we can sit in the back garden, but one advantage of that is being able to comfortably share meals with people.

Wednesday was productive, sorting through papers and Mom's jewelry and a few oddments. The will leaves a few specific pieces of jewelry to Simon's daughter and two of my cousins, so we need(ed) to locate those. Beyond that we can do whatever seems good, and had agreed to offer things we didn't want to our cousins. We've found one piece Adrian is taking, and there's a bracelet of Grandma's that my cousin Janet asked us to sell her. If we find it, it's Janet's, as a gift.

After Mark and Linza left, the three of us decompressed a bit. After supper, I sorted through a bunch of [photos, pulling out a few that I want and/or thought Mark would want to least see. My mother's youth hostel card, signed by her and Grandpa, was in an envelope, along with a 1949 student discount subway pass, which got her free or discounted trips home from school. Thirty-odd years later, they were giving us passes good for free trips both ways, but only after the first few weeks of the semester.

In going through papers, and figuring out what we need, including things the executors and Mom's account might need, we have so far found four social security cards. What seems to be the original has a number stamped on it rather than neatly printed. One of the others makes sense in that it has her second married name on it--Eve Rosenzweig Kugler--but four still seems like a lot.

I'm going to post this and have some breakfast.

via oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
( cut for length )